This paper describes the key role that city authorities and their civil societies should play in mediating the relationship between economic globalization and human development so that cities act not only as engines of growth but also as agents for greater social justice and environmental sustainability. In a globalizing and urbanizing world, urban governments have a much more important role in...

In this article, the authors investigate the effects of economic conditions on support for an incumbent regime in a newAfrican democracy. Drawing on two unique data sources fromZambia—the results of a 1,200-respondent postelection survey and a pair of 10,000-household poverty surveys conducted in the same years as that country’s first two posttransition general elections—the authors find eviden...

The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the Gastil democracy index from Freedom House. First, the basic pattern of correlations reveals that a good ...

Should Lebanon abandon the consociational democratic system? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining the pathologies of the current system and then evaluating its strengths, weaknesses, and potential for reform. Theories of consociational democracy and of conflict regulation are used in this analysis. This paper concludes that there is potential for limited reforms that will mak...

This paper is based on a research aimed at investigating celebrity politics using the emerging theories on celebrity capital in the context of an emerging democracy or third wave democracy, Ghana. The research focuses on the role of celebrity endorsement in the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns in Ghana to explore the mechanism of celebrity politics and capital in Ghana. The main aim of this pap...

One of the most salient changes in the world economy since 1980 has been the move toward freer trade among countries across the globe. How do existing theories about trade policy explain this puzzle? Three sets of explanations are prominent. First, many focus on changes in trade policy preferences among domestic actors, either societal groups or political leaders. Second, scholars examine chang...

We examine the flavor structure of the trilinear superpotential couplings which can result from embedding the Standard Model within D brane sectors in Type IIB orientifold models, which are examples within the Type I string framework. We find in general that the allowed flavor structures of the Yukawa coupling matrices to leading order are given by basic variations on the “democratic” texture a...

PERIKLIS Electronic Democracy in the 21st Century is a Greek National project [1][2], funded from EU and Hellenic Government from ESPA funding scheme [3], whose goal is to improve quality of life in the urban environment by increasing opportunities for interaction between citizens and between citizens and public services, through the use of mobile and social network technologies. In this way, t...

This Lecture begins with a puzzle about Albert Hirschman’s famous work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Why do we make much of exit and voice but utterly neglect loyalty? It’s a question that goes well beyond Hirschman’s book. For example, much of constitutional theory is preoccupied with a single question: What does a democracy owe its minorities? And most of the answers to this question fit natural...

Online debate tools for participatory democracy and crowdsourcing legislation are limited by different factors. One of them arises when discussion of proposals reaches a large number of contributions and therefore citizens encounter difficulties in mapping the arguments that constitute the dialectical debate. To address this issue, we present a visualization tool that shows the discussion of an...